25 December 2015

I first made the point that the character of Silas Barnaby in Hal Roach's Babes in Toyland represented a synthesis of Jewish stereotypes with a post dated 24 December 2012. (That first stab at the topic has some flaws, mainly because I had not read the libretto for the original stage-production.) Thereafter other bloggers wrote on the same thesis. One year after, the quasi-outraged Rainer Chlodwig von Kook wrote "March of the Wooden National-Socialists" then there was an article by Tomato Bubble's Mike King, who even used images from my original post.

The article below was submitted to The Occidental Observer in time for Christmas 2015, but was rejected for publication.

An Interpretation of Hal Roach's Babes in Toyland

by Hadding
Scott

Hal Roach's 1934 film Babes in Toyland was later given the alternate title March of the Wooden Soldiers. Here, to avoid confusion with the 1903 operetta and 1904 children's book of the same name (or the 1961 Disney film, which is slightly closer to the operetta), I will consistently use the alternate title to refer to Hal Roach's film. There is, after all, good reason for not referring to these very different works by the same title.March of the Wooden Soldiers is
a 1934 film from Hal Roach's production company, starring Stan Laurel
and Oliver Hardy. It pretends to be based on the 1903 operetta Babes
in Toyland by librettist Glen MacDonough and composer Victor
Herbert. While Roach's film includes some elements of the famous
operetta, however, including some of the great music, it is a very
different work, with different characters and a different story. I
argue that what Hal Roach and his writers created is a racial
allegory.

First, it is necessary to know what happens in the film.

Plot-Summary

After a fairly lengthy familiarization with what kinds of pleasant and innocent people inhabit Toyland, mostly characters from nursery-rhymes, the story
begins with sinister old Silas Barnaby visiting the Old Woman in the
Shoe to ask about the Old Woman's nubile daughter, Little Bo-Peep,
who has just gone out. Bushy-browed Barnaby locates Bo-Peep, a slender
blonde beauty, and proposes marriage.

When Bo-Peep refuses, Barnaby becomes
threatening and returns to Mother Peep demanding a mortgage-payment
on the Shoe, which she is unable to make.

Stannie Dum and Ollie Dee live in an
upstairs room of the Shoe. Ollie Dee has saved up some money that he
will give to Mother Peep to keep up with the mortgage, but Stannie
Dum has borrowed it to buy “peewees,” leaving an “IOU.”

Stannie Dum and Ollie Dee are workers
in the Toy Factory. Ollie hopes to get the money for Mother Peep from the
Master Toymaker, with whom he claims to be on good terms, but Stannie
made a blunder that ruined any possibility of that. Santa Claus has
ordered 600 toy soldiers 1 foot high, but Stannie garbled the order so that
100 soldiers 6 feet high were made. Santa Claus says, “I couldn't
give those things to my children to play with!” and the one
toy-soldier that Stannie and Ollie have brought out for demonstration
proceeds to make a wreck of the Toy Factory, making it impossible to ask
the Master Toymaker for any favors.

Tom-Tom the Piper's Son has proposed
marriage to Little Bo-Peep and she has accepted, but Silas Barnaby
will not be deterred. He returns to issue an ultimatum to Mother
Peep: either Little Bo-Peep will marry him or Mother Peep and the other
residents of the Shoe will be cast out onto the street.

After an attempt to solve Mother Peep's
problems by sneaking into Barnaby's house, Stannie Dum and Ollie Dee
are convicted of burglary and sentenced by Old King Cole to dunking,
to be followed by banishment to Bogeyland. At this point Little
Bo-Peep agrees to marry Silas Barnaby, with the result that he
drops the charges against Stannie and Ollie.

Bo-Peep is given a way out of the
marriage when Stannie, covered in a bridal veil, takes her place at
the wedding, to be unveiled only after Barnaby hands over the
mortgage on the Shoe. Ollie gets the mortgage in his hands and tears
it up before Silas Barnaby detects the trick.

After this fortunate turn, Tom-Tom
tells Bo-Peep that he will take her away, and sings “Castle in
Spain.” But this is not the end of the film: there is nearly half
an hour to go, enough time for Barnaby to attempt revenge. Like the
Big Bad Wolf, Barnaby blows over Elmer the Pig's house of straw and
abducts him. Barnaby then has the pig's hat and fiddle and some
sausages planted in Tom-Tom's house to frame him for “pignapping.”
Old King Cole banishes Tom-Tom to Bogeyland.

Stannie and Ollie accidentally discover that the sausage used to frame Tom-Tom was beef, not pork, then find
Elmer the Pig bound and gagged in Barnaby's cellar, but Tom-Tom has already been
carried away to Bogeyland. Barnaby flees as Old King Cole offers 50
thousand guineas for the scoundrel's capture “dead or alive.”

Bo-Peep goes looking for Tom-Tom in
Bogeyland and finds him. Then Barnaby finds the two of them sleeping
in a cave and a struggle ensues. Barnaby summons his minions, the
apelike Bogeymen, to help him capture Tom-Tom and Bo-Peep.

Stannie and Ollie, pursuing Barnaby,
happen upon Tom-Tom and Bo-Peep, and, panicking at the site of the
onrushing Bogeymen, flee with them back to Toyland, where, recounting their
experience, they play the role of heroes.

Meanwhile Barnaby vows “to destroy
the whole of Toyland” by leading the onslaught of the Bogeymen. The
gates of Toyland are thrown open with Silas Barnaby at the head of a mob of
furry brown men, who seem primarily occupied with getting into the
dwellings where people are hiding and then carrying them away.

Stannie and Ollie fight the Bogeymen
with darts, until Stannie gets the idea of activating the 100
six-foot-tall toy soldiers. The march of the soldiers out of the toy
warehouse to the scene of battle is an awesome sight. The Bogeymen
are no match for the Wooden Soldiers and are quickly defeated.

The Bogeymen at the end are pushed out
the gate and into the moat, where they are eaten by crocodiles and
the townspeople have a great laugh. Ollie then accidentally gets shot
with a cannonload of darts.

Babes in Toyland vs.
Oliver and Hardy in Toyland

Hal Roach's 1934 film, although it
begins with Mother Goose singing “Toyland” as she introduces
characters from a book titled Babes in Toyland, tells an entirely
different story from the one in the book, and really none of the characters are the same. Only
certain elements from MacDonough's Babes in Toyland are
retained, and some of those retained elements are given a very
different meaning.

Whereas MacDonough's story wanders
through several towns and other locales, the 1934 screenplay has only two locales: the charming walled city called Toyland where all the harmless
nursery-rhyme characters live (with a villain among them), and on the
other hand Bogeyland, a wilderness inhabited by Bogeymen. The
Bogeymen play a key part in the 1934 production, insofar as the
villain mobilizes them in an attack on Toyland (the main event in
what I see as a racial allegory), whereas in the book neither
Bogeyland nor Bogeymen exist, and no such attack occurs.

The differences between the villain of
the 1934 production and the villain of the book are most
important. For one thing, they have different names. The original villain was Uncle Barnaby, whereas the 1934 villain is Silas Barnaby. That is
an important difference that relates to the different crimes of the
two villains.

Uncle Barnaby's intended victims were his nephew and niece, whom he wanted to kill so that he
could steal their inheritance; MacDonough's story revolves entirely
around this intention of murder and larceny, and the children's
escape. Although the Uncle Barnaby of the book is a greedy usurer, and
although he is said to wear a skullcap – considerations that might lead
one to ask about his ethnicity – there is a barrier to interpreting
Uncle Barnaby as Jewish, insofar as he is a blood-relative of the
main characters, his intended victims, about whom there is nothing
remotely Jewish. (The innocent niece and nephew, the main characters
of the book, do not appear at all in Hal Roach's film.)

By contrast, the Silas Barnaby of the
1934 production is nobody's uncle, which leaves open the possibility
of seeing him as a Jew. Indeed he seems to be a composite of negative
Jewish stereotypes: he is the usurer, the shyster, the agitator. He
has power and influence because of his money, but the central motive
for Silas Barnaby has nothing to do with money: rather, he is trying
to force the young, pure, idealistic blonde, Little Bo-Peep, to marry
him. (That may not seem an especially Jewish motive but it can be taken as a
metaphor for the Jewish demand of not being excluded from anything in
Gentile society.) The way that Silas Barnaby attempts to force Little
Bo-Peep to marry him also happens to anticipate in several respects (or perhaps inspired,
given that the later film is not a strictly accurate history) the cinematic representation of Joseph Suess
Oppenheimer in Veit Harlan's Jud Süß(1940), where Little Bo- Peep is replaced by Dorothea Sturm.

A blogger named Mike King, who has clearly taken his cue from my original post on this topic from 24 December 2012, makes much of the fact that Barnaby's assistant wears what looks like a yarmulke. By itself, it is hard to know how much to make of that, since the Master Toymaker also wears a skullcap (although different). The headwear of Barnaby's assistant, however, gains significance from the fact that the wearer is also the only swarthy person and the only character with a foreign accent in the film. ("Foreign-born" used to be practically a euphemism for Jewish.) Although inconclusive in itself, all of this together can be taken as corroborative of the other evidence of Barnaby's Jewishness.

Of course, unless it is recorded
somewhere that one of them actually said so, it is impossible to
prove absolutely that Hal Roach and his screenwriters, Frank Butler and Nick
Grindé – or Stan Laurel, if his influence went that far – intended Silas Barnaby as a Jew. It is certain, however, that
Silas Barnaby can be seen as a Jew. The gestalt
implying the Jewishness of Silas Barnaby – at least three Jewish stereotypes in one character – is (for me at least) quite
compelling.

Bogeymen of the Early
20th Century

Barring inspiration from some
non-material realm, creatures of fantasy such as the Bogeymen must be
derived from things that actually exist. It is not hard to think of a
foundation in reality for the idea of Bogeymen. Ollie Dee tells Old
King Cole that the Bogeymen are “half-man and half-animal”; the
word Bogeymen already says that they are simultaneously men and not
quite men, or a lower type of man.

When the torch-bearing throng of
Bogeymen enters Toyland with Silas Barnaby at their head, the
residents of Toyland flee into their houses. The Bogeymen rush
through the streets and begin climbing on the houses, looking for
ways to break in. Torches in the Bogeymen's hands imply arson, but
that possibility is never actualized because it would put a blemish
on the eventual happy ending. Arson is not the only likely outcome
that is omitted. We see a Bogeyman seizing a screaming young woman,
and several Bogeyman carrying off children, but of course no one's
clothes are torn or removed. Silas Barnaby himself is in the act of
abducting his own unwilling bride when the Wooden Soldiers arrive to
reestablish order and civilization. In this film for general
audiences, of course the real horror of what Silas Barnaby and the
Bogeymen represent is only implied. What is implied matches what we
know happens when Blacks become lawless.

The White world had experienced
numerous bloody Negro insurrections in the 19th and early
20th centuries.

Outbursts of Black mass-violence
against Whites continued long after slavery was abolished. In the
early 20th century there was a Negro uprising in Cuba
staged by the Partido Independiente de Color that developed
into the Cuban Race War of 1912, which was accompanied by rape,
murder, and “unspeakable outrages” against White women
(Crawfordsville
Review,
6 June 1912). Order was reestablished only
after the United States sent in marines and bluejackets.

In 1915 D.W. Griffith's Birth of a
Nation, one of the most influential films of all time,
represented the Negro takeover and accompanying abuses after the War
of Southern Independence. These troubles, as represented in the film,
were caused fundamentally by a White congressman of perverse will
named Stoneman, and his mulatto protégé Silas Lynch. In the finale, the Negroes' rampage is
suppressed by the arrival of the Ku Klux Klan on horseback.In 1917, the bloody Bolshevik takeover in Russia cast a long shadow over the first half of the 20th century. Lothrop Stoddard's 1922 book, The Revolt Against Civilization: The Menace of the Underman, explained this event as the result of a proliferation of congenital misfits and throwbacks, which he called "the underman."

In the 1920s Lothrop Stoddard added
scholarly respectability to the proposition that the White race must
act to preserve itself against the encroachment and aggression of
non-White races. Stoddard's influence was such that his book The
Rising Tide of Color against White World Supremacy (1920) was
even mentioned – somewhat adversarially – in a 1921
speech given by President Warren G. Harding in
Birmingham, Alabama, where Harding advocated increased rights for
Negroes (thereby demonstrating why Republicans in that era got very
few votes from White Southerners). The Rising Tide of Colorattracted
attention again in 1933 because of concerns
about the expansion of Imperial Japan, about which Stoddard had been
prescient.Stoddard's warnings focused mainly on the human material for revolution, not so much on the instigators. Not infrequently, behind the Negro insurrections of the 19th century there stood an instigator or inspirator who was himself not a Negro but a White man obsessed with Biblical morality, John Brown being the most famous example. In the 20th century, however, agitation of the Negro and of the "underman" against the majority was largely taken over by Jews pursuing power for their ethnic group.The Great Depression, which had begun in 1929, created favorable conditions for a revolutionary movement – notoriously led by Jews (e.g., at that time Herbert Benjamin, Israel Amter, Mike Gold) in the USA as it had been in Russia – to recruit new members with the intention of eventually bringing Bolshevism to the United States. They were especially successful in recruiting Negroes.

Thus, when March of the Wooden
Soldiers appeared in 1934, bloody insurrections by Negroes and other lower humanity were a matter of
living memory and of present concern, and there was widespread awareness of the role of Jews as instigators. Meanwhile, the vision of a violent
Negro rampage suppressed by an armed force of White men constituted
the finale of the greatest motion picture yet created.

In fact, Babes in Toyland can be
seen as in some ways the same story as Birth of a Nation, with
Bogeymen in the place of Blacks and wooden soldiers in the place of
Klansmen, and Silas Barnaby playing a role somewhat analogous to that
of Congressman Stoneman and Silas Lynch. In that light, the copying
of the name Silas from Birth of a Nation, where Silas was the
mulatto who transgressed with his intention to marry a White woman,
seems to be a hint about how the villain of Babes in Toyland
is to be understood. In other words, Silas Barnaby is transgressing against a racial barrier when he seeks to marry Bo-Peep – because he is a Jew.

Hal Roach's Differences
with Jews

The producer is the idea-man behind the
movie . Hollywood producer Hal Roach was an Irish American who, after
starting as an actor in Hollywood, was able to start his own
production-company because of an inheritance. His best-known
productions are the Our Gang shorts, and films featuring Stan
Laurel and Oliver Hardy.

One of Hal Roach's silent productions
in 1927 was a short called Jewish
Prudence, written by Stan Laurel and
starring Jewish character-actor Max Davidson. It portrays Jews in a
thoroughly stereotypical manner that must

Stan Laurel was no dummy.

inevitably have a cautionary effect. It
shows Jews for example as swindlers. Of course this does not mean
that Hal Roach categorically disliked all Jews, but it suggests that
for him Jews as a group were no object of reverence. It may also be significant that Stan Laurel, the writer of Jewish Prudence, is said by various sources to have exerted considerable influence over how March of the Wooden Soldiers turned out (e.g., Danny Lawrence, The Making of Stan Laurel, 2011, p. 82, writes that Roach "yielded to Stan on the creative side of the production").

In 1937, three years after March of
the Wooden Soldiers, Hal Roach formed the RAM (Roach And
Mussolini) production company, with Vittorio Mussolini, the
20-year-old son of the Italian Duce. The company started with
capital from the Banca Nazionale del Lavoro (a subsidiary of the
Italian government at that time) and from Roach himself. Once the
deal was sealed, Roach met the Duce, a great fan of motion-pictures
who hoped that Hal Roach would bring Italian productions up to the
Hollywood standard. Perhaps it was March of the Wooden Soldiers
that had particularly impressed the Italian leader!

When Roach came under attack for this
deal, he made no bones about the fact that the trouble was coming
from Jews. To the Jews, Roach gave a half-pleading, half-scolding
response, recorded in Sheilah Graham's “Hollywood Today” column:

“Mussolini has
never expressed himself against the Jews,” said Roach. “As a
matter of fact, Italy is full of non-Aryans driven out of Germany by
Hitler. But if one day Mussolini adopted Hitler's racial policy, a
man close to him could be of great use. I'm convinced that my
association with Mussolini is the finest thing that could have
happened for the Jews. If they're smart, they'll stop antagonizing
Mussolini by showing bad feeling toward his son.” [Sheilah
Graham, 5 October 1937]

When Vittorio Mussolini visited the
United States in 1937, he first had to avoid Communist protestors in
New York City (AP,
24 September 1937), then was under heavy police
protection during his 20 minute layover in Kansas City (AP,
25 September 1937), then had his presence
“deplored” in paid advertisements by Hollywood's “Anti-Nazi
League for the Defense of American Democracy” (AP,
25 September 1937). With a candor that would
later become quite rare, The Day, a newspaper in New London,
Connecticut, stated unequivocally that the troubles befalling Roach
And Mussolini were due to the prevalence of Jews in Hollywood:

Moreover,
considering the large number of Jews in executive, directorial and
screen acting parts, in Hollywood, it was not surprising to find a
fairly well established antagonism toward Mussolini's son in the
colony. Il Duce is the father of Fascism; in many matters he is
supposed to be working hand and glove with Hitler. Hitler has
persecuted the Jews, and the members of this race in Hollywood think
it not unreasonable to hold that Mussolini is at least indirectly
connected with the troubles that have beset their people.

One author describes the demise of
Roach And Mussolini as having been forced on Roach by the company
that distributed his films:

“The industry as
a whole let Roach know, but fast, that they weren't happy,” said
Roach special effects man Roy Seawright. “But Roach could be
stubborn; he used to be a truck driver and he ran his business the
way he did a truck He saw a road to take, and he was going to go down
that road come hell or high water.”

The upshot of all
this was that an appalled Nick Schenck pulled Loew's distribution out
from under Roach. His last MGM release was the Laurel and Hardy
feature Blockheads, after which, in May of 1938, he began
releasing through United Artists....

Incidentally, the highly conditional
nature of the Hollywood Jews' opposition to Fascism is evident in the
fact that four years prior to the short life of Roach And Mussolini,
Jack Cohn, a vice-president of Columbia Pictures, had made the
encomiastic documentary Mussolini
Speaks, and was thereafter invited to
visit the flattered Duce (“From
the Studios”, Lewiston
Daily Sun,6 February 1933). The difference is that in
the years between Jack Cohn's Mussolini Speaks and Hal Roach's
deal with Vittorio Mussolini, a positive relationship developed
between Italy and National-Socialist Germany, which was seen as
contrary to Jewish interests. This consideration of Jewish interests
made all the difference in whether it was acceptable
for anyone in Hollywood to do business with Fascist Italy, and
whether Fascist Italy must be portrayed positively or negatively.

Thus, Hal Roach backed out of the deal
with Mussolini because Jews forced him and he could not do
otherwise. It is apparent that Hal Roach's political and social
outlook was different from and somewhat opposed to that of Jewish
Hollywood. It does not seem unlikely that Hal Roach would have made a
film with implied negative messages about Jews such as I believe March
of the Wooden Soldiers to be, especially since his studio had
already made at least one short film with overt negative messages
about Jews in 1927.

21 December 2015

It should be no surprise that Negroes are much less suited than Whites for police-work, given the self-control and judgment that are required, and also no surprise that "Hispanics," who generally have some Negro ancestry, turn out to be intermediate between Whites and Negroes in this regard. The surprise (without knowledge of the specific criteria) is that "Asians" perform the worst on the psychological evaluation used by the Philadelphia Police Department:

From 2011 through 2014, 72.5 percent of the 262 black applicants passed the psych evaluation, compared with 81.2 percent of the 823 white candidates.
Hispanic applicants fell in between, at 75 percent of 176 job-seekers. Applicants of Asian descent fared the worst, at less than 58 percent, but their overall numbers were small - just 66 applicants over the four-year period. [Source: Philly.com]

14 December 2015

A famous image from the vastly overrated "London Blitz." According to one estimate, about nine times as many German civilians were killed by Anglo-American bombing, compared to British civilians killed by German bombing, during the Second World War.

Recently I heard Jewish radio talker Michael Savage (né Weiner) claim during one of his usual rants that nobody ever hears about the bombing of British cities by Germans during the Second World War. Really? Nobody ever mentions the so-called Battle of Britain? In my experience, this is rubbish.Perhaps they are not quite as loudly publicized nowadays, but the "London Blitz" and the supposedly unprovoked bombing of Coventry, as subjects of Anglo-American war-propaganda, for a long time received attention that was quite disproportial, given the compared tolls in civilian deaths and wrecked cities wrought by Anglo-American vs. German bombs. On just one night in one city, Darmstadt on 11 September 1944, about ten times as many civilians were intentionally killed by the RAF as were inadvertently killed by the Luftwaffe's bombs in Coventry -- "targeted due to its high concentration of armaments, munitions and engine plants which contributed greatly to the British war effort," says Statemaster Encyclopedia -- during the entire war. Yet the bombing of Darmstadt is nowhere near as well known as "the bombing of Coventry." An RAF-officer named F.W. Winterbotham stated in his bookThe Ultra Secret that Churchill had advance notice of one of the raids, but rather than take steps to avoid civilian casualties in Coventry, Churchill kept the information to himself. There are denials, but if the story is true it means only that Churchill did not have much more regard for British civilian lives than for German civilian lives.

Dresden, February 1945. If you want to see corpses, those are online too.

I just happened to run across an essay from 1972 by syndicated newspaper-columnist John Chamberlain that touches on the disparity:

A careful researcher, Benjamin Coleman of Washington, D.C., has estimated that during World War II 537,000 German civilians were killed by bombing. The Colby account has it that 61 German cities, with a total population of 25 million, either were destroyed or devastated beyond recognition. Britain, by contrast, got off lightly, with a loss of 60,000 civilians.

Cologne, save for its cathedral, and Hamburg were gutted; Dresden was gratuitously ruined after the Allies had the war all wrapped up.

At this point, Chamberlain unintentionally indicates why, in 1945, false accusations about gas-chambers, etc., may have seemed necessary:

Because Hitler was what he was, a monster, I don't weep much for what happened to his country, which had become a totalitarian war-machine.

Take away the gas-chamber story, rebranded 35 years later as "the Holocaust," and what was done to Germany no longer seems justified, Chamberlain implies.The point of the essay, however, was to show the hypocrisy of the Democratic Party's leftist 1972 presidential candidate, George McGovern, who moralized about inadvertent civilian casualties in the U.S. bombing of North Vietnam, but seemed to have no second thoughts about the bombing of civilians in which he had participated during the Second World War:

Senator George McGovern, who goes about the land weeping for the North Vietnamese Prussians, is fully cognizant of the nature of air warfare. After all, he flew 35 World War II missions. By his own admission, he bombed through overcast, which means that he could have hit civilians and even, if they had been present, a dike or two.[1]

His admiring biographer, Sam Anson, quotes him as saying to a friend after the war, "You just dropped those damn bombs where you could and got the hell out of there." On one occasion, his plane, Dakota Queen, jettisoned its bombs over Yugoslavia, vaporizing a farmhouse. It wasn't bomber-pilot McGovern's fault that the bombs hit where they did, and he subsequently kicked the careless bombardier off his crew. But he made no issue of the episode, nor did he report a conversation he heard about a possible war crime involving fighter pilots who shot Italian civilians off a bridge for sport. If he had, we might have had a My Lai[2] then.

McGovern never has made excuses for being part of something in World War II that he condemns in Vietnam now. We must assume, then, that he makes a distinction between the spread of fascism and the spread of communism. It was alright to hit civilians inadvertently in the course of doing away with the Nazis. But when a General Giap, pursuing his Communist objectives, stages an invasion of another country through a demilitarized zone and through bordering neutrals, it is not the same thing as Hitler swinging through the neutralized North European lowlands[3] or descending on neutral Norway[4].

Not, at least, in the mind of George McGovern.

[...]

So let it be understood: McGovern isn't against bombing per se. It was all right to knock the Rhineland to pieces. But it is wrong to bomb Communists in Asia. Stated baldly, that is McGovern's position. He is entitled to it, but let us be spared his tears. [The Evening Independent, 4 October 1972]

George McGovern, in 1972, seems to have been ahead of his time with an axiom that could be stated: white lives don't matter._______________________________1. Bombing dikes to create floods that interrupt supply-lines was a strategy used successfully against the Communists in Korea, forcing them to make peace, but during the Vietnam War a propaganda-offensive by the Communists, echoed by American leftists like McGovern, prevented the same method from being used.2. The My Lai Massacre was a war-crime by soldiers of the U.S. Army during the Vietnam War that was heavily publicized by news-media in the early 1970s.3. The Anglo-French strategy in 1940 was based on the expectation that Germany would cross Belgium to invade France, since going through the Maginot Line or the Ardennes Forest was considered too difficult. This strategy of declaring war, then waiting to be attacked, was understood to mean that Belgium must become a battleground; thus Britain and France deliberately precipitated a German invasion of Belgium, although Germany would get the blame.4. In early 1940 Britain and France were waging war against Germany by means of a blockade. To tighten the blockade by cutting off a route whereby raw materials were still reaching Germany, First Lord of the Admiralty Winston Churchill proposed to invade and occupy Norway. Without the prospect of a British occupation of Norway, there would have been no pressing need for Hitler to occupy Norway, but as it happened the British intention was discovered and German forces barely beat the British forces to it. In the case of Norway, as in the case of Belgium, the British forced a German action then blamed the Germans for it.